Monsier Camembert

Despite the Gallic overtones of its name, Monsieur Camembert actually sprouted from a musical seed planted in downtown Perth. The seed was sown when vocalist Yaron Hallis formed a band called After the Fall, which aimed to make music so welcoming in its embrace that no audience member would feel excluded.

And it is precisely this welcoming embrace that lies at the heart of Monsieur Camembert's success. Now Sydney-based, Hallis has gathered around him a band of free-spirited musical gypsies who - over the past five years - have given flight to their collective vision and created a sound that is both polished and marvellously spontaneous.

At Chapel Off Chapel last Friday, the group played to a surprisingly small crowd, setting a challenge for the musicians - who typically squeeze into noisier, tighter-fitting venues, and who admitted to feeling ever-so-slightly daunted by the space and silence of a theatre setting.

They needn't have worried. From the rippling flourish that opened their first tune (A Good Time Was Had By All), the band was on high-energy alert. Edouard Bronson's clarinet pierced the air like an ambulance siren, as Hallis thrust himself at his rhythm guitar with almost cartoonish vigour.

By the second tune - the sultry Can I Have You, Please - people were already up and dancing. Hallis' voice slid seductively across the lyrics; bassist Mark Szeto let the slinkiness of the melody shape his jazz-inflected solo; and Bronson jumped off the stage to serenade the female dancers with his stentorian tenor saxophone.

By the third tune (an ingeniously-arranged version of Hava Nagila), the band was pulling out all the stops, charging through the chorus like a locomotive without a driver. In fact, each "charge" was expertly controlled by the musicians, who kept hinting at a huge climax and then pulling back at the last minute to keep the audience in their thrall.

Five songs in, Hallis broke his first guitar string of the night.

By the time the second set opened, tables had been moved to make way for dancing, and the audience was shouting "hey, hey, hey!" to accompany the musicians as they leapt and darted through a Klezmer tune, Odessa Bulgarish. Lead guitarist Peter Bulanyi dug exuberantly into his lines, playing up to Hallis' furiously syncopated strumming.

On Kiss of Fire, Svetlana Bunic's accordion strutted in brazen tango steps across Bronson's Russian vocals, then laid expressionistic daubs over the disco groove that suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

And, when the band performed its encore rendition of Istanbul, the first of several glasses smashed to the floor as over-excited audience members banged their fists on their table - confirming in emphatic fashion that, as the band predicted in its opening number, a ridiculously good time was had by all.